The first project of my second year is to create a 4 colour repeat, hand printed onto a silk twill.
I was quite lucky when finding out my team, as one of my best friends was going to be in the same group (you can see her blog here). We worked together on exercises to help us understand the repeat: mark making, speed drawings, working in pattern. I really enjoyed these lessons, it was a great way to get to know the other two girls in my group and also be able to see if our drawing styles worked well together. We spent a few lessons like this, learning about repeat structures and experimenting with textures, then it was time to decide on a theme - Team Tropical was born!
I began drawing and collecting idea's for the theme, I found that drawing leaves that I'd seen at the Eden Project over the summer were the thing I was most interested in. We drew in black, as this is what we would have to do on the drafting film, so we thought we'd better get used to it.
As a group we did some colour testing in down in the print room and eventually decided on our four colours. At first I wasn't too keen as they were extremely bright, which is something I would normally stay away from, but I understood that it fitted with the Tropical theme and that the colours would work well together when overlapping on some layers.
Colours: Bright Turquoise, Pink, Lemon Yellow, Bottle Green
The bottle green was a life saver for me, it really toned everything down.
We the spent about two weeks putting together our repeatable structure and then translating these marks on to our drafting film. This bit was a struggle as I was often left to work on this on my own, due to members of the team not turning up on time, or even at all. Alas, it did get finished eventually and then we were ready to print!
I've always adored the screen printing process, so I couldn't wait to get stuck in! I had the problem again of people not turning up, so i was setting up on my own, but thankfully we have wonderful technicians that are super supportive and helped me a lot until the rest of my group arrived (although one girl was almost two hours late, so we were already on the second layer of colour by the time she arrived!)
Above: progress shots
The whole printing process took us about four and a half hours, and was worth every second! Although after looking at it closely, we realised that there was a few sections that needed more detail, or when making the drafting film we'd obviously completely missed small sections; and like I said, the colours wouldn't have been my personal choice had I been doing this on my own. I still feel it works really well as a repeat - there's no obvious line where the repeat ends, and even though we only used 4 colours, we've been able to make 7 with over lapping the colours we had whilst printing.
Below you will see the full length of fabric, and three of my favourite parts, the sections I felt worked well.
As a group we did some colour testing in down in the print room and eventually decided on our four colours. At first I wasn't too keen as they were extremely bright, which is something I would normally stay away from, but I understood that it fitted with the Tropical theme and that the colours would work well together when overlapping on some layers.
Colours: Bright Turquoise, Pink, Lemon Yellow, Bottle Green
The bottle green was a life saver for me, it really toned everything down.
We the spent about two weeks putting together our repeatable structure and then translating these marks on to our drafting film. This bit was a struggle as I was often left to work on this on my own, due to members of the team not turning up on time, or even at all. Alas, it did get finished eventually and then we were ready to print!
I've always adored the screen printing process, so I couldn't wait to get stuck in! I had the problem again of people not turning up, so i was setting up on my own, but thankfully we have wonderful technicians that are super supportive and helped me a lot until the rest of my group arrived (although one girl was almost two hours late, so we were already on the second layer of colour by the time she arrived!)
The whole printing process took us about four and a half hours, and was worth every second! Although after looking at it closely, we realised that there was a few sections that needed more detail, or when making the drafting film we'd obviously completely missed small sections; and like I said, the colours wouldn't have been my personal choice had I been doing this on my own. I still feel it works really well as a repeat - there's no obvious line where the repeat ends, and even though we only used 4 colours, we've been able to make 7 with over lapping the colours we had whilst printing.
Below you will see the full length of fabric, and three of my favourite parts, the sections I felt worked well.
